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MCC-GE 2211-001
Decolonization and its Aftermath: Postcolonial Visual Culture
Spring 2013
University Hall Room C02A
Tue 2-4.10
The advent of 20th C. decolonization challenged the way in which world history had
been conceived for four centuries, as centered upon the tiny landmass of Western
Europe, rather than say, as plural and polycentric. This course is interested in
exploring the place of visual media in propagating colonial and postcolonial agenda.
Hence it seeks to identify and understand some of the pictorial practices, imagemaking technologies, and visual subjectivities that modern empires have used among
“colonizers” and the “colonized.” We will examine the significance of the visual as a
factor in practices and concepts of decolonization, inquiring into the ways the visual
gets separated or remains within an embodied sensorium, as anticolonial politics
grows and mass media expand alongside. South Asia, as the most populous
concentration of electoral democracies, will offer a series of historical reference
points for the comparative theoretical aims of this class.
Correspondingly, we consider the transformation of these through their entanglement
in empire building, nationalist deployments, post-colonial contestations, and transnational globalization. Even while we track the imbricated histories of the visual and
the (post)colonial, we want to ask what is specifically “imperial” about the imagemaking technologies and practices that we encounter.
The former view made it difficult to understand how the majority of the world's
population mattered to history at all. With the onset of decolonization after the end of
World War I, the world began to be seen, first through the lens of the nation, and
secondly, as an extensive set of interconnections, where seemingly remote events
could have major effects across countries. This course will examine postcolonial
visual culture from its emergence as a colonial field of perception, in state
surveillance practices, in anticolonial politics and in indigenous culture more
generally, and trace some of the lines of force reshaping it over time, that both
expressed and complicated a politics of decolonization, through chromolithography,
cinema, and television into the postcolonial era.
Week One
Battle of Algiers (dir. Gillo Pontecorvo)
Michael Chanan, “Outsiders: The Battle of Algiers and Political Cinema,” Sight and
Sound, June 2007.
David Prochaska, That Was Then, This Is Now: The Battle of Algiers and After,
Radical History Review, Issue 85 (winter 2003): 133–49.
Week 2
Battle of Algiers contd.
Frantz Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” (pp35-66) and “This is the Voice of Algeria,”
(pp71-97) in A Dying Colonialism. Tr. Haakon Chevalier, New York: Grove Press,
1965.
Week 3
Carl Pletsch, “The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, Circa
1950-1975,” Comparative Studies in Society and History Vol. 23, No. 4, Oct., 1981,
pp. 565-590
Frantz Fanon – Wretched of the Earth (pp.7-106; 148-206)
Week Four
Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography. Tr. Louis
Bethlehem. (pp1-124)
Week Five
Partha Chatterjee, Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy
(Preface, Sections II and III)
Week Six
Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (pp. 388).
Week Seven
WJT Mitchell. Seeing Through Race (pp. 1-90).
Week Eight
Faisal Devji, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the temptation of violence (pp. 1-92;
185-191).
Rachel Dwyer, “Gandhi on Film,” Public Culture.
Week Nine
Eyal Weizman, The Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation
Week Ten
Eyal Weizman contd. Screening tba.
Week Eleven
Iftikar Dadi, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia
Week Twelve
Visualizing Democracy in South Asia: Christopher Pinney; Rajagopal; Thomas
Hansen.
Weeks 13-14
Paper presentations.